The State of Vermont and their Governor Peter Shumlin want to shut down Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant. Unfortunately for their cause, only the Federal Government, in this case the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the legal authority to regulate nuclear plant safety. In March the NRC granted the plant permission to operate for another 20 years. Shumlin and his followers don’t like that. They really want the plant shut down. In...

Fast Fission Podcast #23 – Download mp3 Here Ever thought about how many zeros there are there in a “pico” something? Remember back in grade school when we learned the metric system of measures? We started out with units that are easy to visualize: meters get 1000 times bigger and become kilometers; meters get 1000 times smaller and become millimeters. We understand these intuitively because we have a frame of reference and...

Fast Fission Podcast #23 – Download MP3 Here I’ve been reading a lot about the Toyota gas pedal recall because I own a Camry that is a few years old. Several people have been killed in accidents resulting from sudden acceleration caused by a faulty accelerator design. So far my car is not in the group of affected vehicles, but I’m keeping my eye on it. I’m sure you’ve noticed the press is having a feeding frenzy and many are...

Fast Fission Podcast #22 – Get the MP3 File Here There is a political and public relations cauldron boiling in Vermont over a recently discovered tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Tritium is a mildly radioactive isotope of hydrogen and has a 10 day biological half-life when it is ingested by humans. The leak is minute and completely inconsequential from a safety standpoint: the tritium levels very low. Only...

Anti-nuclear activists in Vermont are a strange breed. Yesterday the NRC gave Vermont Yankee the high marks they deserve for plant safety and other performance measures. The anry anti-nukes responded with compost, throwing it, covering NRC documents with it, and spreading it into water glasses. It wasn’t just invectives that flew from mouths of the anti-nuclear activists at Thursday’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission...